Feature
The Gist
- Data-driven insights. CX's backbone is data, enhancing customer engagement and simplifying processes.
- Cultural change matters. Patience in cultural adaptation fosters genuine, stable CX evolution.
- AI and personalization. Generative AI and personalization are pivotal, aiming for a centralized data approach for comprehensive insights.
LAS VEGAS — Customer experience practitioners from around the world attended Experience ’24, Medallia’s annual user conference, at Wynn Las Vegas this week. Talking to these practitioners provided a good opportunity to learn what CX topics are top of mind for companies across industries.
Crissy Hura, director of customer experience at Scientific Games, said that CX adoption is relatively new for the lottery industry. For now, her focus as a CX professional is collecting customer information.
“When I think about all the functions related to CX, I look at data and insight as the backbone,” she said. “Our goal is to build out our knowledge base about how players engage with the digital products we create, which could include everything from loyalty programs to online lotteries.”
For now, data has helped the company learn new insights that make the customer experience better. Hura gave an example of new customers creating accounts and uploading their identification documents for review. Scientific Games learned that it needed to simplify site navigation so that people knew where to go next to upload documents. Once they were able to gain this insight, the solution was relatively simple to ensure that navigation didn’t cause friction in the customer journey.
Another important area of focus for Hura was process and cultural change — a key element of Scientific Games, an organization building up a CX function relatively new to their industry. A big idea discussed by speakers and practitioners at this event was that cultural change takes time. It may not move as quickly as some companies would like, but being patient will help the change be more genuine and stable. In addition, Hura stressed the importance of vocal, visible leadership for culture change.
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Big Ideas Around Data and Analytics
About three years ago, Albert Kao was asked to run a new CX and data team at Hot Topic. CX was part of the marketing function that did not necessarily receive enough resources. However, once it evolved into an independent team, Kao — now the vice president of CX and analytics at the company — was able to think bigger about how Hot Topic could grow its CX capabilities.
Kao highlighted just how much buzz generative AI has among the crowd of CX professionals at the conference. There are two ways to view AI, he said. The first view is what AI can do to enhance what CX teams do, such as making everything faster and more scalable. The other part is considering what big insights AI can bring to teams. Ideally, a CX team will focus on both these uses, Kao said.
He also stressed the importance of security features and governance around AI.
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“I think it’s important for the company itself to have their own governance and their own philosophy around AI. But if they find a partner where that matches, that’s usually the best and makes it really easy to work together,” Kao said.
Finally, he stressed the significance of personalization, which he described as “the holy grail” of what Hot Topic is trying to accomplish with CX. For many companies, data silos exist, but a centralized data center will help organizations learn the full story — rather than only bits and pieces of the story that teams can learn from their isolated data bank.
In this sense, Kao says the CX team at Hot Topic was lucky to have built their CX team from the ground up with personalization as a clear goal in mind. They were able to create a centralized data source from the beginning. Still, he stressed, even companies that have not done this from the beginning can go through steps to centralize their data into a single source of truth.
Related Article: 5 Tips for Improving Personalized Customer Experience
Zeroing in on Better Customer Understanding
Mesut Oecalan, global D2C strategy expert at BSH Home Appliances, has also been working on a relatively new CX goal in the past few years. Customers generally buy the company’s products — such as washing machines, coffee makers and other appliances — from an appliance store. Therefore, B2C has always been a focus on the business.
However, part of Oecalan’s job in the past two years has been to build up B2C sales as well. His ultimate goal is for BSH to be “the most consumer-centric company in the world within our industry.”
As someone whose goal is to get closer to customers and sell to them directly, Oecalan was very interested to hear what other practitioners had to say about generative AI. One big benefit of generative AI is its ability to simplify the life of marketing managers who don’t have the time to take care of everything it takes to deliver excellent CX, he said.
Another technology he stressed was text mining — especially for organizations looking to more holistically understand customers, their pain points and what improvements they want to see. “Consumers are talking about our brands everywhere,” he said. “They’re writing reviews on Amazon, [and] they’re speaking about our brands on social media. It’s a huge amount of data.”
It’s essentially impossible for one person to read all this information and summarize it into meaningful insight and advice, he added. It’s been valuable technology for his team to actively use to understand customers. With this solution, he said, you’ll learn something new every day.